Intel Carves Mainstream Highway for Lustre

By Nicole Hemsoth

June 12, 2013

It’s been just a tick under a year since Intel’s acquisition of Whamcloud and its Lustre braintrust. While it was a rather quiet transition, the chipmaker made some noteworthy strides toward pushing Lustre further into the mainstream–without ignoring its roots in HPC.

The company kicked two announcements about Lustre into the arena with high hopes of appealing to the enterprise crowd. Both news items are meant to strike a chord with the big business crowd–a market that’s increasingly interested in (you guessed it) “big data” and Hadoop, as well as general usability for ever-mounting scalability troubles.

Brent Gorda, founder and former CEO of Whamcloud, who now manages all things Lustre for Intel, said that the file system has a dangerous reputation as being hard to handle, despite its recognized benefits. This bad rap, however, spins from a misconception that’s fed from the stream of news out of multi-petabyte installations where Lustre really can require some serious expertise, according to Gorda.

Still, businesses are looking to plug in Lustre, at least according to Intel, which tends to pay attention to customer demand. While they want Lustre benefits, their hangup is that they don’t want to make new hires to run the file system. Hence the rollout today of Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre, which comes with a new management tool called Intel Manager for Lustre.

As Gorda explains, it’s all about opening access to Lustre for the “rest of the world.” He says that currently, it’s the big national labs that are hiring people to run it since they need the scalability and reliability it offers. What Intel decided, based on customer demand, is that they want to offer approachable tools for Lustre to anyone who can manage a Linux box. The key here, argues Gorda, is not just the benefits of the management interface– it’s the Lustre support that’s now backed by a tier-1 vendor (versus little old Whamcloud peddling its support that made the big shops shy).

As with any software project, this mainstreaming of Lustre will be a process of evolution. But at this point, the management tool simplifies interacting with Lustre so users can wick away the need to deal with command lining, finding configuration files all over the place and are freed from watching logs scroll by. The management tool does all of this, thus Intel argues, opening access to Lustre without making companies add more bodies to deal with it–making it far more attractive to some key areas that are scaling at HPC levels (oil and gas, financial services…the usual suspects).

In addition to the management tool to facilitate wider adoption of Lustre in new environments, the company made a Hadoop announcement set to sing to those frustrated with the native Hadoop file system (HDFS), at least for those who have tapped Intel’s distro. Gorda described how one talented Lustre and HDFS expert steamrolled Hadoop with a new Java class to fully swap in Lustre over HDFS. The impetus here was that many of the traditional HPC sites were talking to Intel about their Hadoop plans. Of course, the needs of a file system for Hadoop at the Web 2.0 scale wouldn’t necessitate such a swap-out since it runs on local disk for most. For the HPC’ers, however, the disks were probably lifted from the boxes a decade ago, so the challenge is convincing Hadoop to run off a global parallel file system–a trick he says they’ve pulled off nicely.

Further, Gorda said that in a conversation with an oil and gas company about the pending HDFS news, the business did the math and found that Hadoop’s triple-replication was going to cost them quite a bit more than Lustre.

When it comes to Hadoop, “Lustre is performing faster than local disk because we’re feeding you data at network bandwidths, which are generally faster. When it comes time for the sort/merge stage, you already have a global scratch space, which means you don’t have to do all the communication steps that are necessary with local disk,” Gorda explained.

During our chat yesterday, Gorda seemed genuinely enthusiastic about how Intel’s might has led to increasing adoption and interest in Lustre. He said that prior to coming Intel’s wing, they would talk to potential big name customers in financial services and other areas who were in need of a robust file system for large node-counts but were put off by the fact that Whamcloud had only a small team. With Intel’s namepower and funding–both through the Fast Forward program and the company’s own ambition to deliver Lustre to new markets based on demand–Gorda says Lustre will continue to meet the eventual needs of exascale and the current demands from enterprise users who have smacked into the scaling wall with their current file systems.

Outside of today’s news items around Lustre, Gorda said there are some cool things brewing for the coming months, particularly powered by Fast Forward program funds.

For instance, he pointed to work being done on so-called burst buffers and new innovations fed by solid state. . As one can imagine, a file system that’s looking toward such technologies might be laden with some interesting features that could dramatically speed data and focus on latency as the data moves ever closer to the compute.

He also talked about how his team is adding an object storage model to Lustre. As he noted, “POSIX is getting long in the tooth; it was not designed to go this far due to locking and semantic issues. We’re going down the path of building out–specifically for HPC–an object-based interface that is different than today’s cloud object models. The goal is to offer a way to communicate directly to the application about where its data is self-consistent. So if the application is humming along, clicking in at checkpoints, you’ll know, for example, that your fifth checkpoint is consistent when all our tasks check in and move on to the next iteration. Intel’s Lustre team is refining this development currently.

As for the future of Lustre in environments outside of the traditional purview of HPC, Gorda remains confident that the power of Intel will be enough to add some new sway. The new developments to add to usability help boost Lustre’s profile and once word hits the mainstream Hadoop-obsessed press with news of a super-scalable HDFS replacement, it could mean big things for the file system’s future.

By Thomas Ayres

Claiming no less than a reshaping of the future of Intel-dominated datacenter computing, Qualcomm Technologies, the market leader in smartphone chips, announced the forthcoming availability of what it says is the world’s first 10nm processor for servers, based on ARM Holding’s chip designs. Read more…

By John Russell

Sometime in Q2 2017 the first ‘results’ of the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer (JDACS4C) will become publicly available according to Rick Stevens. He leads one of three JDACS4C pilot projects pressing deep learning (DL) into service in the War on Cancer. The pilots, supported in part by DOE exascale funding, not only seek to do good by advancing cancer research and therapy but also to advance deep learning capabilities and infrastructure with an eye towards eventual use on exascale machines. Read more…

By John Russell

Transferring data from one data center to another in search of lower regional energy costs isn’t a new concept, but Yahoo Japan is putting the idea into transcontinental effect with a system that transfers 50TB of data a day from Japan to the U.S., where electricity costs a quarter of the rates in Japan. Read more…

By Staff

Who is Dell EMC and why should you care? Glad you asked is Jim Ganthier’s quick response. Ganthier is SVP for validated solutions and high performance computing for the new (even bigger) technology giant Dell EMC following Dell’s acquisition of EMC in September. In this case, says Ganthier, the blending of the two companies is a 1+1 = 5 proposition. Not bad math if you can pull it off. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

Sometime in Q2 2017 the first ‘results’ of the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer (JDACS4C) will become publicly available according to Rick Stevens. He leads one of three JDACS4C pilot projects pressing deep learning (DL) into service in the War on Cancer. The pilots, supported in part by DOE exascale funding, not only seek to do good by advancing cancer research and therapy but also to advance deep learning capabilities and infrastructure with an eye towards eventual use on exascale machines. Read more…

By John Russell

Who is Dell EMC and why should you care? Glad you asked is Jim Ganthier’s quick response. Ganthier is SVP for validated solutions and high performance computing for the new (even bigger) technology giant Dell EMC following Dell’s acquisition of EMC in September. In this case, says Ganthier, the blending of the two companies is a 1+1 = 5 proposition. Not bad math if you can pull it off. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

At first blush, and maybe second blush too, Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) purchase of SGI seems like an unambiguous win-win. SGI’s advanced shared memory technology, its popular UV product line (Hanna), deep vertical market expertise, and services-led go-to-market capability all give HPE a leg up in its drive to remake itself. Bear in mind HPE came into existence just a year ago with the split of Hewlett-Packard. The computer landscape, including HPC, is shifting with still unclear consequences. One wonders who’s next on the deal block following Dell’s recent merger with EMC. Read more…

By John Russell

In 1994, two NASA employees connected 16 commodity workstations together using a standard Ethernet LAN and installed open-source message passing software that allowed their number-crunching scientific application to run on the whole “cluster” of machines as if it were a single entity. Read more…

By Vincent Natoli, Stone Ridge Technology

After offering OpenPower Summit attendees a limited preview in April, IBM is unveiling further details of its next-gen CPU, Power9, which the tech mainstay is counting on to regain market share ceded to rival Intel. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

Amazon Web Services has seeded its cloud with Nvidia Tesla K80 GPUs to meet the growing demand for accelerated computing across an increasingly-diverse range of workloads. The P2 instance family is a welcome addition for compute- and data-focused users who were growing frustrated with the performance limitations of Amazon's G2 instances, which are backed by three-year-old Nvidia GRID K520 graphics cards. Read more…

By John Russell

The Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) hit an important milestone today with the announcement of its first round of funding, moving the nation closer to its goal of reaching capable exascale computing by 2023. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

ARM and Fujitsu today announced a scalable vector extension (SVE) to the ARMv8-A architecture intended to enhance ARM capabilities in HPC workloads. Fujitsu is the lead silicon partner in the effort (so far) and will use ARM with SVE technology in its post K computer, Japan’s next flagship supercomputer planned for the 2020 timeframe. This is an important incremental step for ARM, which seeks to push more aggressively into mainstream and HPC server markets. Read more…

By John Russell

Not long after revealing more details about its next-gen Power9 chip due in 2017, IBM today rolled out three new Power8-based Linux servers and a new version of its Power8 chip featuring Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect. Read more…

By John Russell

Vector instructions, once a powerful performance innovation of supercomputing in the 1970s and 1980s became an obsolete technology in the 1990s. But like the mythical phoenix bird, vector instructions have arisen from the ashes. Here is the history of a technology that went from new to old then back to new. Read more…

By Lynd Stringer

Leading Solution Providers

The 48th edition of the TOP500 list is fresh off the presses and while there is no new number one system, as previously teased by China, there are a number of notable entrants from the US and around the world and significant trends to report on. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

At the Intel Developer Forum, held in San Francisco this week, Intel Senior Vice President and General Manager Diane Bryant announced the launch of Intel's Silicon Photonics product line and teased a brand-new Phi product, codenamed "Knights Mill," aimed at machine learning workloads. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

With OpenPOWER activity ramping up and IBM’s prominent role in the upcoming DOE machines Summit and Sierra, it’s a good time to look at how the IBM POWER CPU stacks up against the x86 Xeon Haswell CPU from Intel. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

The freshly minted Dell EMC division of Dell Technologies is on a mission to take HPC mainstream with a strategy that hinges on engineered solutions, beginning with a focus on three industry verticals: manufacturing, research and life sciences. "Unlike traditional HPC where everybody bought parts, assembled parts and ran the workloads and did iterative engineering, we want folks to focus on time to innovation and let us worry about the infrastructure," said Jim Ganthier, senior vice president, validated solutions organization at Dell EMC Converged Platforms Solution Division. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

Neuromorphic computing – brain inspired computing – has long been a tantalizing goal. The human brain does with around 20 watts what supercomputers do with megawatts. And power consumption isn’t the only difference. Fundamentally, brains ‘think differently’ than the von Neumann architecture-based computers. While neuromorphic computing progress has been intriguing, it has still not proven very practical. Read more…

By John Russell

HPC container platform Singularity is just six months out from its 1.0 release but already is making inroads across the HPC research landscape. It's in use at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), where Singularity founder Gregory Kurtzer has worked in the High Performance Computing Services (HPCS) group for 16 years. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

Micron Technology used last week’s Flash Memory Summit to roll out its new line of 3D XPoint memory technology jointly developed with Intel while demonstrating the technology in solid-state drives. Micron claimed its Quantx line delivers PCI Express (PCIe) SSD performance with read latencies at less than 10 microseconds and writes at less than 20 microseconds. Read more…

By George Leopold

Tucked in a back section of the SC16 exhibit hall, quantum computing pioneer D-Wave has been talking up its new 2000-qubit processor announced in September. Forget for a moment the criticism sometimes aimed at D-Wave. This small Canadian company has sold several machines including, for example, ones to Lockheed and NASA, and has worked with Google on mapping machine learning problems to quantum computing. In July Los Alamos National Laboratory took possession of a 1000-quibit D-Wave 2X system that LANL ordered a year ago around the time of SC15. Read more…